Making sense of the information systems use field

Abstract

Information Systems (IS) Use has been discussed for more than three decades. During this time various perspectives of IS Use are found in the literature, which leads to a complex picture. Thus the main research question is “How to make sense of the IS Use field?” To begin to address this question I discuss the diversity and development of IS Use discourses as contributing to this complexity. The standard ways of understanding diversity and development of perspectives or discourses as paradigms (Burrell and Morgan, etc.) are found to be insufficient. A deeper understanding of what paradigm means is required. Yet, discussion of what paradigms are in philosophy of science (Kuhn, etc.) is controversial and is unable to address both diversity and development in the IS Use field. This thesis argues that Dooyeweerd’s philosophy can provide fruitful understanding of these. This is given an indicative test by investigating ‘what is important’ to the authors of seminal papers who stimulated the main IS Use discourses. A desk study approach was used to aspectually analyse the relevant texts in these papers.
The findings are that I) Dooyeweerd's philosophy can provide new insight into the nature of paradigms. II) Dooyeweerd's aspects can provide a rich understanding of the diversity and development of Information Systems Use paradigms. These give one way of making sense of IS Use field that overcomes problems of existing approaches.
This way making sense of the IS Use field can contribute: I) To theory, first in IS, by bringing integration to the field of IS Use and stimulating new avenues of research, Second to philosophy of science, by Dooyeweerdian insight into the nature of paradigms; II) To methodology in IS by using Dooyeweerd’s aspects as a tool to investigate what is implicitly held as important to the authors; III) To Dooyeweerd research community by showing the application of it in addressing the diversity and development of IS Use perspectives. Limitations of the research and possible further research are discussed in the conclusion.